Hitchhiking Arrest Leads To Lawsuit

September 30, 1988

CICERO — A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been filed against Cicero alleging that the south suburb`s Police Department regularly arrests minority women for hitchhiking as a way of keeping minorities out of town.

The allegation was made in the suit filed by Valerie Davis, 32, a nurse`s aide from the West Side, who charges that her civil rights were violated on Sept. 22, 1987, when she was falsely arrested by Cicero police. Davis says in the suit that she was waiting for a bus or an elevated train to go to work when a plainclothes Cicero police officer arrested her. She alleges that she was booked on a hitchhiking charge and kept overnight in the police lockup. Town Attorney Dennis Both denied Thursday that Cicero has any policy regarding the arrest of minorities for hitchhiking, but he declined to comment further until he reviewed the suit.

One count of the complaint asks for $500,000 in damages, and two others each ask for $1 million in compensatory and $100,000 in punitive damages.